Why the electric vehicle boom could put a major strain on the U.S. power grid

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2 years ago

July 1, 2023

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Over half of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2030 are expected to be electric vehicles. That could put a major strain on our nation’s electric grid, an aging system built for a world that runs on fossil fuels.

Domestic electricity demand in 2022 is expected to increase up to 18% by 2030 and 38% by 2035, according to an analysis by the Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Analysis Toolkit, or REPEAT, an energy policy project out of Princeton University. That’s a big change over the roughly 5% increase we saw in the past decade.

“So we’ve got a lot of power demand coming to this country when we really didn’t have any for the last, like, 25 years,” said Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, a transmission policy group.

While many parts of the economy are moving away from fossil fuels toward electrification — think household appliances such as stoves, and space heating for homes and offices — the transportation sector is driving the increase. Light-duty vehicles, a segment that excludes large trucks and aviation, are projected to use up to 3,360% more electricity by 2035 than they do today, according to Princeton’s data.

But electrification is only an effective decarbonization solution if it’s paired with a major buildout of renewable energy. “So we have both supply-side and demand-side drivers of big grid needs,” Gramlich said.

That means we need major changes to the grid: more high-voltage transmission lines to transport electricity from rural wind and solar power plants to demand centers; smaller distribution lines and transformers for last-mile electricity delivery; and hardware such as inverters that allow customers with home batteries, EVs and solar panels to feed excess energy back into the grid.

It’s not going to be cheap. In a study commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission, grid analytics company Kevala forecasts that California alone will have to spend $50 billion by 2035 in distribution grid upgrades to meet its ambitious EV targets.

Major grid infrastructure needs

Charging electric vehicles is quite electricity intensive. While a direct comparison with appliances depends on many variables, an owner of a new Tesla Model 3 who drives the national average of around 14,000 miles per year would use about the same amount of electricity charging their vehicle at home as they would on their electric water heater over the course of a year, and about 10 times more electricity than it would take to power a new, energy-efficient refrigerator. Larger electric vehicles such as the Ford F-150 Lightning would generally use more electricity than a central AC unit in a large home.

Lydia Krefta, director of clean energy transportation at PG&E, said the utility currently has about 470,000 electric vehicles connected to the grid in its service territory of Northern and Central California and is aiming for 3 million by 2030.

Given that PG&E’s territory covers about 1 in 7 electric vehicles in the U.S., how it handles the EV transition could serve as a model for the nation. It’s no easy task. The utility is tied to a four-year funding cycle for grid infrastructure upgrades, and its last funding request was in 2021. Now that funding will definitely fall short of what’s needed, Krefta said.

Workers for Source Power Services, contracted by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), repair a power transformer in Healdsburg, California, on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

“A lot of the analysis that went into that request came from, like, 2019 or 2020 forecasts, in particular some of those older EV forecasts that didn’t anticipate some of the growth that we believe we’re more likely to see now,” Krefta said. This situation has PG&E applying for numerous state and federal grants that could help it meet its electrification targets.

“I think right now people have an overly simplistic view of what electrification of transportation means,” said Kevala CEO Aram Shumavon. “If done right, it will be phenomenal; if mismanaged, there are going to be a lot of upset people, and that is a real risk. That’s a risk for regulators. That’s a risk for politicians, and that’s a risk for utilities.”

Shumavon said that if grid infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the EV boom, drivers can expect charging difficulties such as long queues or only being able to charge at certain times and places. An overly strained grid will also be more vulnerable to extreme weather events and prone to blackouts, which California experienced in 2020.

The most straightforward way to meet growing electricity demand is to bring more energy sources online, preferably green ones. But though it’s easy to site coal and natural gas plants close to population centers, the best solar and wind resources are usually more rural.

That means what the U.S. really needs is more high-voltage transmission lines, which can transport solar and wind resources across county and state lines.

But Gramlich said that while we’re constantly spending money replacing and upgrading old lines, we’re hardly building any new ones. “I think we need probably about $20 [million] or $30 million a year on new capacity, new line miles and new delivery capacity. We’re spending close to zero on that right now.”

There are major regulatory hurdles when it comes to building new transmission lines, which often cross through multiple counties, states and utility service areas, all of which need to approve of the line and agree on how to finance it.

“If you just think about a line crossing two or three dozen different utility territories, they have a way to recover their costs on their local system, but they kind of throw up their hands when there’s something that benefits three dozen utilities, and who’s supposed to pay, how much, and how are we going to decide?” Gramlich said.

Permitting is a major holdup as well. All new energy projects must undergo a series of impact studies to evaluate what new transmission equipment is required, how much it will cost and who will pay. But the list of projects stuck in this process is massive. The total amount of electricity generation in the queues, almost all of which is renewable, exceeds the total generating capacity on the grid today.

The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to cut emissions by about 1 billion tons by 2030, according to Princeton’s REPEAT project. But by this same analysis, if transmission infrastructure buildout doesn’t more than double its historical growth rate of 1% per year, more than 80% of these reductions could be lost.

An ‘in-between period’

Efforts are underway to expedite the energy infrastructure buildout. Most notably, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced a permitting reform bill in May after similar measures failed last year. President Joe Biden has thrown his support behind the bill, which would speed up permitting for all types of energy projects, including fossil fuel infrastructure. The politics will be tricky to navigate, though, as many Democrats view the bill as overly friendly to fossil fuel interests.

But even if the pace of permitting accelerates and we start spending big on transmission soon, it will still take years to build the infrastructure that’s needed.

“There’s going to be an in-between period where the need is very high, but the transmission can’t be built during the time period where the need happens, and distributed energy resources are going to play a very active role in managing that process, because no other resources will be available,” Shumavon explained.

That means that resources such as residential solar and battery systems could help stabilize the grid as customers generate their own power and sell excess electricity back to the grid. Automakers are also increasingly equipping their EVs with bidirectional charging capabilities, which allow customers to use their giant EV battery packs to power their homes or provide electricity back to the grid, just like a regular home battery system. Tesla doesn’t currently offer this functionality, but has indicated that it will in the coming years, while other models such as the Ford F-150 Lightning and Nissan Leaf already do.

Ford’s all electric F-150 Lightning offers bidirectional charging, allowing customers to use the truck’s EV battery to power their home.

Ford Motor Company

There will also likely be greater emphasis on energy efficiency and energy timing use. PG&E, for example, is thinking about how to optimize charging times for large electric vehicle fleets.

“One thing that we’re trying to do is to work with some of these companies that are putting in substantial loads to provide flexible load constraints where we can say you can only charge 50 EVs at 7 p.m., but at 2 a.m. you can charge all 100,” Krefta said.

Krefta hopes constraints on charging times are temporary, though, and said that moving forward, PG&E is looking to incentivize consumers through dynamic pricing, in which electricity prices are higher during times of peak demand and lower at off-peak hours. And the utility is working with automakers to figure out how electric vehicles can provide maximum benefit to the grid.

“What kinds of things do you need to do in your garage to enable your vehicle to power your home? How can you leverage your vehicle to charge whenever there’s renewables on the grid and they’re clean and low cost and then discharge back to the grid during the evening hours?” Krefta said it’s questions like these that will help create the green grid of the future.

Watch the video to learn more about how the U.S. power grid can prepare for the boom in electric vehicles.

Technology

Google Calendar no longer includes start of Black History Month, Pride Month

Published

12 hours ago

February 10, 2025

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Google Calendar no longer includes start of Black History Month, Pride Month

The Google Calendar logo is displayed on a tablet.

Igor Golovniov | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google‘s popular online and mobile calendars no longer include reference to the first day of Black History Month or Women’s History month, among other holidays and events.

The company’s calendar previously had those days marked at the start of February and March, respectively, but they don’t appear for 2025.

The Verge first reported on the removals from Google Calendar late last week, which followed comments from users.

A Google spokesperson said the changes took place in the middle of last year.

“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson added.

Eight years after selling AppDynamics to Cisco, Jyoti Bansal is pursuing an unusual merger

Published

18 hours ago

February 10, 2025

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Eight years after selling AppDynamics to Cisco, Jyoti Bansal is pursuing an unusual merger

Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO of startup Harness.

Harness

Jyoti Bansal knows about weird acquisitions.

Eight years ago, his software company, AppDynamics, was on the doorstep of a blockbuster IPO. A day before the offering, Cisco swooped in and bought the company for $2.7 billion

Now Bansal is at the center of an equally unconventional combination.

Since 2020, Bansal has been running two startups as co-founder and CEO: Harness and Traceable. The former’s technology helps companies manage code and the latter’s software observes where companies are unintentionally letting out sensitive data.

Late this month or early next, Harness and Traceable will merge. The resulting company will have 1,100 employees, $250 million in expected 2025 annualized revenue, a 50% growth rate and a valuation of about $5 billion.

“It’s about the same size that AppDynamics was when we were about to go public,” Bansal told CNBC in an interview last week.

Through the combination, Bansal said, Harness will be able to sell more products to customers, and Traceable will be better insulated from competitors like HashiCorp, which IBM has agreed to buy, and Akamai, which acquired security startup Noname last year.

This time, Bansal wants an active stock ticker.

In an interview last year with CNBC’s Make It, Bansal said he was unfulfilled after selling AppDynamics and that he didn’t finish what he had started.

“Everyone told me, ‘You should retire. Go on the beach. What else do you need to do?'” Bansal said. “That was my first instinct, as well. I wanted to trek in the Himalayas, hike Machu Picchu, do a safari in Africa, see the fjords in Norway. In six months, my bucket list was done. And I started to realize: That’s not it for me.”

Bansal got back to work and set up Big Labs, a studio for exploring startup ideas. Big Labs spawned Harness in 2017 and then Traceable in 2020. Sanjay Nagaraj, Traceable’s other co-founder, recalled working on the security startup in a dedicated Big Labs room at Harness’ San Francisco headquarters.

One day before its IPO, Cisco buys AppDynamics

The arrangement was unorthodox.

“I’ve never done this before, backed a CEO to run two companies simultaneously,” said Harrick, who joined Institutional Venture Partners in 2001 and sits on the boards of Harness and Traceable. “But Jyoti is that good. He’s not only a great executive, but he hires well and he delegates well, and so I just talked to Jyoti. I said, ‘This is a major risk.’ I got his assurance he wouldn’t do a third one.”

Establishing Harness and Traceable as separate companies made sense to Bansal at the time, because their products would typically get sold to different buyers within an organization. But that’s changed in the past year or two, he said, as engineering and technology leaders have started to also make decisions on procuring tools for securing code and data.

Employees took notice of the shift and, during all-hands meetings at both companies, would repeatedly ask Bansal about a consolidation, he said. Questions also came from clients.

“The Harness team would go set up a meeting with an executive at a bank or some of our customers,” Bansal said. “I would go into the meeting and the executive would say, ‘It’s a one-hour meeting. Can we save the last 15 minutes? Because I also want to talk about Traceable.'”

Bansal was effectively the first IT person at both companies, setting up the same Google productivity apps and Carta equity management software as each got started. A spokesperson said 70% of Traceable’s largest customers are Harness customers as well.

The cultures were also similar. As Harness and Traceable matured, Bansal picked a general manager to run each distinctive new product, or module. When examining revenue for the modules, executives at both startups rely on a theory that Battery Ventures investor Neeraj Agrawal calls “triple, triple, double, double, double,” or T2D3. The model, which Agrawal wrote about in TechCrunch in 2015, describes the annualized revenue growth that cloud software startups can target.

In November, Bansal told the two boards that his companies were on converging paths and that it would be difficult to keep them from competing with each other. He got clearance for a merger.

Initially, Traceable will operate as as its own unit within Harness, the parent company, and Nagaraj will be general manager. Bansal said the structure may change in the future.

He’s confident that the technologies will pair well together and can benefit from tighter integrations. Harness will be able to help clients understand the origin of their source code, and Traceable can show how people are using it.

Harrick calls it’s a good outcome, and said he’s excited to consolidate his bet on Bansal.

“I think it’s a benefit for all investors for him to focus on operating one company instead of two,” Harrick said.

WATCH: AppDynamics founder is building a new start-up

Technology

France unveils 109-billion-euro AI investment as Europe looks to keep up with U.S.

Published

22 hours ago

February 10, 2025

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France unveils 109-billion-euro AI investment as Europe looks to keep up with U.S.

French President Emmanuel Macron greets journalists after meetings with guests at the Elysee Palace before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France, July 26, 2024. REUTERS/Yara Nard

Yara Nardi | Reuters

France’s artificial intelligence sector will receive 109 billion euros ($112.6 billion) of private investment in the “coming years,” President Emmanuel Macron announced Sunday ahead of the country’s global AI summit.

Speaking with French broadcaster TF1, Macron described the multibillion-euro pledge as “the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate,” referring to U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive $500 billion private AI investment project.

The U.S. joint venture, dubbed Stargate, will see OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank spend up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure in America over the next four years.

Meanwhile, the French financing will include commitments from the United Arab Emirates, American and Canadian investments funds and French companies like telecommunications firms Iliad and Orange, and aerospace and defense group Thales.

A few days before France’s AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday, the UAE said it would invest between 30 billion euros and 50 billion euros in the construction of a one-gigawatt AI data center in France as part of a campus focused on the technology’s development.

Synthesia CEO: France's 109-billion-euro AI investment plan is 'great' for Europe

Iliad committed to spending 3 billion euros on AI infrastructure, while Paris-based AI firm Mistral announced plans to invest billions to build its own data center in France.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO of British AI startup Synthesia, said Macron’s 109-billion-euro investment plan was a “great” thing for the European AI ecosystem — but added that more is needed to ensure the continent is able to compete with tech heavyweights like the U.S. and China.

“We need to set the right foundations for Europe to thrive as an ecosystem,” Riparbelli told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal Monday.

“It’s great that we invest more in infrastructure. I don’t think it’s the sole solution to the problem. There’s lots of other things we need to worry about as well. But what I think is really great, is there’s political will to actually do something,” he added.

Global AI race in focus

The Artificial Intelligence Action Summit will see world leaders and bosses from some of the leading companies developing the technology gather in Paris.

Big-name attendees include U.S. Vice President JD Vance, EU President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft President Brad Smith, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Elon Musk is currently not slated to attend.

On Saturday, Axios reported that OpenAI’s Altman will this week warn world leaders they need to widen their AI mindset so that, rather than just focusing on risk — as has often been the case in Europe — leaders will instead look to embrace growth and opportunity.

The emergence of Chinese firm DeepSeek’s breakthrough open-source AI model R1 in recent weeks has stirred debates in the industry around the huge capital expenditures companies are committing toward computing infrastructure to train their systems.

DeepSeek said total training costs for its newest AI model amounted to $5.6 million. However, doubts have been raised about DeepSeek’s claims.

Last month, semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis estimated that DeepSeek’s hardware spend is higher than $500 million over the company’s history, adding that the startup’s research and development and ownership costs are significant.

On Sunday, Google DeepMind’s Hassabis said DeepSeek’s AI model is “probably the best work” he’s seen out of China — but added that, from a technology point of view, it was not a big change.

“Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” Hassabis said, adding that the hype around Deepseek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”

Nevertheless, with companies spending billions on data centers filled with advanced semiconductors from U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, DeepSeek’s new model has led to worries of a potential bubble in the AI space.

Ahead of the AI summit, Mike Capone, CEO of U.S. software firm Qlik, told CNBC that DeepSeek is likely to be a major discussion point this week as world governments grapple with China’s AI advances.

“This summit isn’t just about AI—it’s about influence,” Capone told CNBC on Friday. “Expect a strategic messaging war as U.S., French, and UK AI leaders downplay DeepSeek’s relevance while China works to prove it’s not just catching up — it’s setting the pace.”

“AI diplomacy is now as critical as AI development. The power struggle won’t be about who builds the best model; it’ll be about who controls the AI narrative,” he added.

– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report